— CHAPTER FIVE: First Battle —

Human-Centauri escorted Holsteader's and Krammer's vessels to the
Human-Centauri/CN Leonis hyper hole, and Brezhnev's and Carter's vessels to
the Human-Centauri/Sirius hyper hole, without incident or aggression. At
least the Human-Centaurians could be counted on to keep their word.
Sirius, however, had no such qualms; doubtlessly its comminucation relays would
refuse to forward Carter's messages to Sol as soon as they found out that Sol
was now officially their enemy. He didn't like the situation one bit.

"Has he announced it yet?" the ambassador asked his pilot.

"Announced what?" the man's hardened jaw line turned to Carter.

"Our sanctions. Has Ayatollah Brezhnev announced to Sirius that Sol is
taking military action against them yet?"

"He told 'em that before we even got through the hole."

"Ulch." Carter put a hand over his eyes. Then, he snapped his
fingers and brightened up. "No, wait, that's good! They know we've
broken off diplomatic relations with them, but their Human-Centauri gate guard
didn't fire on us. They're going to let us through!"

"Or they just hadn't made up their minds to attack us yet."

Carter's heart sank.

"Sirius A IV's on the far side of its orbit from us, but the news has had time
to reach some of the nearer outpost stations. I've been radar-sweeping
the space in that direction for spacecraft movements ever since we got
here. We'll know if they mean to make a move on us by the time the latest
echoes get back, or if we pick up any engine telltales first."

Carter turned away and put his hands behind his back. Being ambushed
wasn't his idea of a good time. "Can't you make this crate go any
faster?"

"This ain't a combat vessel," the pilot replied. "We can't pull more than
about one gee without burning out the fusers or knocking down the
furniture. And besides, we're gonna have to start slowing down long
before we get to the Sirius/Sol hyper hole."

"Slow down?!" Carter yelped. "Good God, man, why?! We'll be
sitting ducks for the Gate Guard on the Sirius side! Screw the traffic
controllers, why can't we just go through the hyper hole at full tilt?"

"Two words," the pilot replied sternly, "Boundary shear. Anything
inside the hyper hole when it crosses the plane appears on the other side of
the link. Anything outside the hole doesn't. If part
of this spacecraft intersects the edge of the hole, the part of it that's
sticking out past the edge will stay in Sirian space. The boundary acts
like an infinitely-sharp knife. Even at low speeds, boundary-shear
incidents happen about once or twice a year due to pilot error. If we
go barrelling toward that little two-hundred-meter target at thousands of
kilometers per second — which I'll remind you is both moving in orbit
around Sirius A and very slowly rotating in synch with the hole it's
linked to — we'll be lucky to even hit it, much less to hit the dead
center."

Carter cringed. He turned to one of his aides. "Is our missile
ready yet?"

The aide snapped to attention. "All loaded up in the E-mag launcher,
ambassador. It's set to transmit as soon as Sol's Gate Guard is in
line-of-sight."

"Good. Then send it. If we don't make it back, Sol's got to know
what happened."

"Right." The aide opened the central door in the floor and climbed down
the ladder, disappearing into the next room.

"I sure hope it makes it if we don't," Carter muttered.

He stuck his head into his bubble-shaped window. A hum echoed through the
spacecraft, which changed pitch as the launcher gently shoved its cargo
forward. For the brief instant the launch lasted, Carter felt light on
his feet; the launch had been made with such force that a little of the
spacecraft's otherwise-relentless acceleration was briefly cancelled.
Once well clear of the limo, the missile's tiny hot-fusion engine flared into
life. Carter glipsed the tiny speck of blue-white light far ahead and
watched it dwindle and vanish in the distance. His announcement of
five-way war was on its way.

The pilot checked his radar. "The missile's on course, all right.
At fuel burnout it should be going six zero permil, relative."

The pilot glared down through the hatch on the bottom of his flight deck,
directly at Carter. "You're the one who got us into this war."

"Hey," Carter protested, "This isn't a war. We've received no news of a
formal declaration of war from Sol. We're engaged in sanctions with
aggressor nations to protect our interests and ensure lasting peace."

"Diplomats," the pilot snorted as he turned back to his displays. "You'd
sell people's children into slavery and then find a way to sugar-coat it."

Carter didn't know whether to feel incensed or ashamed. "So," he tried to
change the subject, "Am I to assume that our trip back through Sirian space
will take the same five days it did to cross it on the way out?"

The pilot nodded. "It'll be a little quicker, but not by
much. We're following what's called a Full Brachistochrone
trajectory. We accelerate continuously up to the half way point, then
turn around and decelerate for the other half of the trip. It's the
fastest way get to your destination without zipping past your
destination. Usually, we just fly a near brachistochrone, where
we coast for the middle twenty percent or so of the trip. That's when you
get that little mid-flight zero-gee period I've heard you complain about so
much. The delta-vee you expend accelerating is nearly wasted close to the
midpoint; you're only going to do a full brachistochrone when you're in
a real hurry."

Like we are now, Carter thought.

"It does have one safety issue, though. If you underestimate the fuel
requiremests, or if your engine fails after you've been accelerating for a
while, you won't be able to slow down. You'd go whizzing past your
destination and off into deep space."

"And . . ." Carter began, "We'd have the same problem if somebody
shot at us along the way, and disabled our engine."

The pilot snorted. "If somebody does shoot at us, they've got a better
chance of blasting us apart than they do of disabling us. Y'might as well
settle in and not stress about it. If they do attack, we'll have
plenty of advance warning."

"I don't suppose there's any way we can sneak past them, is there?"

"None," the pilot replied.

"Don't we have one of those Radar-absorbing field things?" Carter queried.

"Wouldn't matter even if we did. Active Radar Absorption only makes it
a little harder for enemy weapons to hit you, it doesn't prevent them from
detecting you. As efficient as QC&C engines are, you're still going to
radiate a lot of waste heat — we're like a thermal-infrared beacon.
And interplanetary space isn't exactly full of hiding places."

Carter felt a lump in the pit of his stomach.

His pilot reassured him: "The good news is, I got instructions from
the civil traffic controllers just a couple minutes ago. If they meant
to kill us, they wouldn't be talking to us."

Carter couldn't sleep any more. The long days crossing a foreign star
system were boring enough without the threat of annihilation hanging
over his head. Even if the Sirius/Sol Gate Guard were still relaying his
messages to Sol — which it wasn't — it still took several minutes
for any transmission he made to get to the Gate Guard, what with comm
signals moving at the sluggish cosmic speed limit of 300 000 kilometers
per second. And it would take the better part of an hour for the relayed
signal to get from the Gate Guard to anyone he might want to talk to.
And both delays again should his receipent decide to send a reply.
Conversation was impossible at those speeds, let alone networked games or other
interpersonal pasttimes. Even news and passive entertainment feeds at
such distances required somebody to point one at you, which no one in
the Sirius A system seemed willing to do. He'd seen every movie in the
limo's library that was worth seeing, and couldn't stomach the idea of watching
another one.

He almost considered reading a book, but he wasn't that desperate
yet. Perhaps a mock virtual battle against the Limo's S.I. might help
pass the time. He donned the rendering glasses, put his hands on the
mice — bristling with buttons shaped for his fingers, both — and
chose one of his old favorites: Barbary Coast pirates. Boarding a wooden
sailing ship brimming with cutlass-armed marines, drawing his one-shot
flintlock pistol at the right moment, ducking inside the hold and using the
pine bulkheads against his foes; there was a chess game of sorts being played
underneath the veneer, but the thrill of the parry and riposte — with no
rules other than kill or be killed — had the visceral appeal his career
utterly lacked.

He rounded a virtual corner, the scene painted with utter realism by the
glasses, the smells of salt air and sweat on his virtual brow shunted directly
to his olfactory nerves, the rocking of his ship tingling gently on his inner
ear. He was up on the main deck now, looking out across open sea at the
nearing ship. It was flying an old American flag bearing fifteen stars
and fifteen stripes. Carter sighed; it was the British ships that made
the most tempting targets, laden with heaps of gold and jewelry. These
little American schooners, so far out from their home port, hardly seemed worth
raiding half the time. But, a target was a target. He grabbed onto
the rigging as his pirate cutter swung to cross their soon-to-be victims' path.

From the front, the enemy couldn't get a shot at them with its broadside
cannons — if this schooner even had cannons. His ship's
rocking increased as they crossed the oncoming bow shock, and they were upon
them. Able pirate hands thrust boarding planks out and onto the hapless
schooner's deck. With a muffled battle cry, he leapt up onto a plank and
charged toward his prey, cutlass drawn and shining in the sunlight. The
enemy deckhands scattered, terrified by their Barbary attackers, but soon
enough the American marines swarmed the deck and were upon them. A burly
lad swung a claymore right at him, but the heavy blade moved so slowly he
easily dodged out of the way. A quick counterthrust with his cutlass
pierced the lad's right flank; he screamed with pain and collapsed.

"Ambassador!"

He raised an eyebrow in surprise. Someone called out "ambassador"?
That was new. Was this ship carrying an ambassador? They might be
able to take a valuable hostage. He kicked one of the scrawnier marines
flat onto his back, then parried another cutlass-to-cutlass.

"Carter!"

That couldn't have been right. In this reality, he wasn't James
Carter, ambassador of Sol; he was was Yizak Al'Akbar, terror of the Barbary
Coast. The game wasn't even supposed to know his real-life
name. Was that his pilot's voice? As he hooked his cutlass around
his opponent's and disarmed him, everything went black. Shocked back into
the real world, he yanked off the rendering glasses and barked, "What?"

"We've got incoming," the pilot announced from above him.

"Huh?"

"We've got two thermal sources accelerating right toward us at nearly a hundred
gee. They've gotta be fighters."

Carter's blood ran cold.

"Haven't heard a peep outta their traffic controllers for three hours,
either. I've asked them to confirm what those fighters are doing, but I
don't think we're going to get a response." He sighed. "Looks like
the Sirians finally made up their minds about attacking us."

"M-maybe the fighters're headed for the same hyper hole we are," Carter hoped,
"To, um, to attack Sol or something."

"If they were mounting an offensive, they'd be towed there by their carrier,"
the pilot noted, "Not closing under their own power. The fuel costs of
running a hot-fusion engine at a hundred gee are enormous. They only do
it when they want to close with a target or run away."

"Um," Carter's voice shook from his loose nerves, "How — how long before
they get here?"

"They're about forty-five million kilometers away. If they follow
standard procedure, they'll accelerate to ten or eleven permil and then coast,
which puts their E.T.E. at a little under four hours. That's about two
hours shy of our rendezvous with the Sirius/Sol hyper hole."

Carter buried his face in his hands. Then, he snapped his fingers.
"Can you call them up? Maybe I can talk them into calling off their
watchdogs and letting us through."

"No no," Carter shook his head, "I mean, call up the people who launched the
fighters in the first place."

"Their launching base is over forty-five million klicks away. Any comm
signal we sent would take two-and-a-half minutes to get there, so you can
forget holding any kind of conversation in real time — assuming we even
knew what frequencies they'd be listening to. And that outpost is
probably following orders that were beamed to it from Sirius A IV; they
wouldn't have the authority to call off the attack even if they wanted to."

"Then let me send a comm laser message to Sirius A IV!"

The pilot thought for a moment. "Okay, but you need to do it now,
and make it quick. The closer those fighters get, the worse off we'll
be if we're transmitting. And you can't tell 'em anything about
our situation."

"Excuse me," Carter bristled, "But I think I know a thing or two about
diplomacy. We'll transmit as often as we need to, and be as honest as we
need to, to talk our way out of this."

"Ambassador," the pilot looked squarely down at him through the hatch, "My
number one job — my only job — is to maximize your chances
of getting back to Sol space safely. If Sirius has really decided to
go hostile on us, I need to defend this spacecraft. Every watt of
radio or UV energy we broadcast, no matter how tightly beamed, is a
beacon. Every plea we make on such a broadcast can give away our fuel
situation, or our maneuvering limits, or our intent. Their traffic
controllers have stopped sending us updates because they want us to be in the
dark. We need to keep them as much in the dark if we're to have
the best chance of making it through this in one piece, and frankly, right now,
our chances of that aren't too good even without you broadcasting your
heart on your sleeve."

Carter looked down at his shoes. This was worse than he thought.
"All right, then. S-skip the message." He took a few breaths, and
was surprised at how nervous and uneven he sounded.

"There's one shot we have to survive this," the pilot reckoned. "Sirian
military doctrine calls for fighters to always assume a worst-case scenario,
i.e. fighter-versus-fighter combat. They keep coasting at their cruising
speed all the way, rather than slowing before they get there. Their
thinking is that if their target is another fighter, it might accelerate away
just as fast and they'll never catch it. But, this means that when
they arrive, they're zipping past their target at full tilt; they've gotta fire
their weapons on that one quick pass and hope they score a solid hit.
It's actually a pretty stupid doctrine; Sol's already abandoned it in favor of
a rendezvous strategy. If we can dodge their weapons fire on that one
pass, it'll take them so long to brake to a stop and come back at us that we
should be able to make it all the way to the Sirius/Sol hyper hole."

"B-but you said there were two fighters after us!" Carter was
near panic.

"Yeah," the pilot added glumly, "And each one's going to make a separate
pass. There's one other thing we can do to tip the odds in our
favor. Throttling back to idle."

Carter felt his stomach lift out of his seat as gravity vanished. "You're
turning off the engine?!"

The pilot flipped three neighboring switches, then with determination, cranked
the rotary switch below them to the right. Quick dings and pings
reverberated through the hull. "Decoys away! . . . We
just launched four thermal decoys, each about as big as a soccer ball.
They give off a blackbody spectrum that looks just like ours does when our
engine's off. They're small, but they're just as bright as us in the
thermal infra-red. They're even programmed to dim themselves at the same
rate as this limo cools off without engines. And they're practically
mirror-balls in the microwave range, so their radar cross-section'll looks as
big as ours does if the enemy decides to do radar sweeps. Each of our
attackers now has to pick one of five thermal sources to close with. If
the guys who built those decoys did a good enough job, they've got an 80%
chance to pick the wrong one. By the time they're close enough to tell,
we'll be too far away for them to get a positive weapons lock on us.
We'll be out of range of everything except their cruise missiles."

Carter glared up at him. "Cruise missiles?"

"Fighters can carry a wide assortment of armaments," the pilot noted. "If
they are using cruise missiles, though, they'll only be carrying one or
two of 'em each. Those things have their own engines and their own fuel
supplies, so they can get pretty heavy. They mostly launch 'em at long
range and let 'em accelerate toward their target, so that they're zipping along
as fast as twenty permil relative when they hit. At that speed, they
don't even need a warhead; the impact alone will blast most spacecraft into
fragments."

Carter scanned the cabin around him, seeing everything implode in his
mind. He looked at the plushly-adorned wall that separated him from the
vacuum outside, and imagined it shattering into a million shrapnel
shards. He saw himself adrift, surrounded by stars and baking in the
ultraviolet-rich shine of Sirius, his arms and legs flailing as he choked on
the utter lack of air before consciousness and life left him.

The pilot looked down at Carter through the hatch. "All we can do now is
wait. You might as well go back to your video game."

Like I could enjoy it now, Carter thought. He tightened his
harness and tried to slow his nervous breathing. Staring out the window
at the background stars only served to remind him of what might happen.
He looked blankly at the softly-lit plush wall in front of him, and thought
of home.

"Yes!" came a cheer from above after what seemed like only a moment.
Carter jolted to attention; he must have dozed off. How long had he been
out? "They bought it," the pilot announced, "They both bought it!
Both of the fighters are chasing after our decoys! One of 'em's
closing on decoy A, the other's on decoy D. In another hour, they'll pass
the point where they can intercept us at all!"

Carter allowed himself a smile of relief. Then:

"Uh oh. More thermal sources, separating from the fighters. It's
gotta be their cruise missiles." The pilot scanned the readouts, watching
the situation evolve while Carter waited in tense silence. "They're going
at least twelve permil relative and . . . dammit, I should have
thought of this. One of 'em launched a missile, and the other launched
two missiles. The single launch looks like it's accelerating
toward decoy C. With the double launch, one'll be accelerating toward
decoy B, and the other'll be accelerating toward us. They've
covered all the bases."

Carter didn't get what he meant by covering bases — it was probably some
quaint analogy — but he didn't have to. Their Sirian nemeses were
attacking all four decoys and the limo, to ensure that he wouldn't get
away.

"... yep," the pilot sputtered after a tense silence. "Ho boy. That
one's headed right for us, all right. It'll be a while before it
arrives. We've already lost a lot of deceleration time while we've been
playing possum, so I'm going to throttle back up to full the moment we pass the
intercept threshold for the other four bandits. Ironic thing is, to slow
down enough so that we don't miss the Sirius/Sol hyper hole, I'm gonna have to
accelerate almost directly toward the one missile that's aimed at us."

"So it'll hit us even harder?!" Carter winced.

"Speed is both your enemy and your friend when a kinetic missile's after you,"
the pilot explained. "On the one hand, the faster it's coming at you,
the more deadly the impact if it hits. On the other hand, the faster it's
closing, the harder it'll be for it to make course corrections if we get out
of the way at the last instant. When that missile gets within eighty
thousand klicks or so, we'll go to evasive maneuvering."

"I keep the engine throttled up to full, then tell the limo to rotate hard and
fast in random directions. The spacecraft's S.I.'ll try as best as it can
to keep the engine pointed perpendicular to the missile's course while we
rotate, to maximize our chance of being missed." The pilot held up his
fingers and tried to mime the action of the limo vis-a-vis the incoming
projectile. "We can't rotate as fast as the missile — heck, we
can't even rotate as fast as a full-sized fighter carrier — but at max
output our attitude jets should give us five or ten degrees per second
that the missile can't predict. Then it's just a matter of how fast we
can accelerate in that new direction. We've spent a good deal of our fuel
load coming this far, so at full throttle we should be able to pull
about 1.2g. Any more than that and we'd stress the limo's
superstructure."

"It doesn't sound very comfortable for us, either," Carter grumbled.

"Getting hit by a cruise missile is even less comfortable. In
fact, it might not even need to hit us directly. Some of these missiles
carry a low-yield shrapnel warhead. If it gets within a couple hundred
meters or so, it detonates, and now you're not just dodging a single solid
object but a whole cloud of high-speed debris, with each chunk coming
toward you as fast as the missile was."

"Wh-what'll a piece of shrapnel do if it hits?" Carter asked.

"Punch right through the hull and come out the other side, if we're
lucky. If we're not lucky, the hull absorbs enough of the impact energy
that it explodes and tears itself open. We've got a whipple shield, but
it's designed to protect against small impacts at natural interplanetery
speeds — you know, like ten or fifteen kilometers per second. A
cruise missile can close with you at six thousand kilometers per
second. It won't even matter if they make the shrapnel out of chocolate
pudding and feather pillows; at that speed, any hit will ruin your day."

"Oh, geez," Carter was visibly shaking now.

"Well," the pilot tried to reassure him, "We can't be sure that missile
does have a shrapnel warhead. The carrrier that launched those
fighters might've been stocked for planetary defense. Every scrap of
debris in a planetary orbit is a navigation hazard, so for an orbital defense
weapon, shrapnel bursts are one thing you'd want to avoid. If we're
lucky, this cruise missile might be the kind that stays in one piece."

There was nothing to do about it for the next hour, though. Just
wait. Carter put the video headset on again and tried to find some
kind of mindless entertainment to fill the time, but the terrified gnawing in
the pit of his stomach just refused to leave. It was almost more relaxing
to run through worst-case scenarios in his head than it was to try and forget
his situation.

"That's the S.I. telling me that the hour is up. Neither of the fighters,
nor two of the three missiles, can intercept us any longer, even at a hundred
g. Set yourself and anything you're carrying on something
horizontal, I'm throttling up to full."

The warning wasn't necessary; Carter had already strapped himself into his seat
as tightly as he could hours ago. He sagged into the cushions as the
engine resumed its relentless push. His full weight returned, and then
some. Ugh . . . the extra 0.2g was annoying.
Instinctively, he glanced out his bubble-window, but he didn't know what he
expected to see. His attackers, and the incoming cruise missile, were
way too distant to be made out by the naked eye. By the time the
missile was close enough to see, even as a tiny speck, it would be upon
them. "How long before we're hit?"

"We're not gonna be hit," the pilot lied, more to reassure himself than Carter.

"How long," Carter insisted.

"Impact should — no. Closest approach should be in eighteen
minutes."

More waiting, Carter thought. A missile with a hundred g
engine was closing on them, crossing the width of South America every second,
and still he had to wait. He wished they'd just get it over with.

He counted down the minutes on his watch. He felt so defensel— "Do
. . . do we have anything we can shoot at the missile?"

The pilot shook his head. "This is only a diplomatic limo. We
don't have any weapons."

"What about the message missile launcher?" Carter offered.

"It's got no targeting," the pilot replied. "And neither do the message
missiles it launches."

"You said it was coming toward us at twelve permils, right?" Carter asked.

"Fourteen permil now," the pilot answered.

"Well," Carter mulled, "Couldn't we just dump something in its path? I
mean, at that speed . . ." he tried to phrase his thoughts so that
they'd make sense . . . "I mean, anything the missile runs into
should do just as much damage to the missile, right?"

"Which is why they're programmed to get out of the way," the pilot said.
"They've got thermal sensors and radar for tracking their target. They
can also track other objects on a collision course and dodge them."

"What if it's something bigger than we are, so that avoiding it means it'll
have to miss us? Like, say, a big cloud of ball bearings?"

"Or a big cloud of sand?," the pilot completed Carter's thought. "It
would have to be a huge cloud of sand or BBs, more than all the junk we
carry on board put together. By the time that cloud got a few kilometers
away, it'd be so sparse that the missile would fit in between the grains.
If we timed it so that we released the sand right when the missile was about to
reach us, so that the sand cloud only travelled a kilometer or two, well
. . . the missile's going to cross the last 4 or 5 kilometers to us
in a thousandth of a second. Even if one of your sand grains got an
incredibly lucky hit and completetely destroyed the missile, the debris
from the missile would still hit us at the same speed."

Carter's heart sank. If they got close enough to disable it, they'd be
too close for disabling it to make any difference.

Ten minutes remained on his watch.

Eight.

Four.

Two.

One. He glanced over at his aide. He had a barf bag
out, of all things. Was he actually overcome by the steady 1.2g
they'd been experiencing? Even Carter was hardier than that.

"Eighty thousand klicks," the pilot announced some seconds later. "Going
to evasive!"

The limo rocked like a sailing ship on stormy seas. It briefly reminded
Carter of the rocking ship in his virtual pirate game, but that game had been
engineered for enjoyment, and this uneven pitching was anything but
enjoyable. The same steady 1.2g kept him pressed to his seat as
before, but now the whole room twisted around it, first left, then back, then
right, in an unpredictable pattern he had no hope to compensate for. He
felt the bile rise in his throat as dizziness and nausea threatened to
overwhelm him. Now he understood why his aide had readied a barf bag for
himself. He stared out the window to try and reduce the nausea, but it
didn't help — the background stars swirled and changed direction
continuously, making it impossible to fixate on anything.

"Damn, it's correcting course!" the pilot cursed, scanning his panels.
"This is gonna be close." Carter was amazed that this man could keep his
attention on his instruments at all. The pilot sat in the limo's nose,
the farthest point from its center of mass; all this evasive maneuvering was
tossing him around even harder than Carter and his aide.

Something bright flashed outside the window. The missile's exhaust
plume! To be close enough to be that bright, it must —

"Yeah!" the pilot screamed. "It missed us! It missed
us! Thank you, thank you, S.I.!" He kissed his palm and slapped
it on the dashboard. "Hah, look at it go!" he cheered as he watched the
blip on his scope vanish into the distance. "It'll be outta gas before it
can come to a stop!"

After one more rotation, the evasive maneuvering mercifully came to an
end. They were now decelerating in a straight line again. Carter
breathed with relief, both for his life and for his stomach.

"Now all we've gotta do," the pilot gasped between exhausted breaths, "Is make
it past their Gate Guard."

The limo continued its relentless 1.2g braking as it fell toward what
seemed, to Carter, like their ultimate fate. "There's not a chance in
hell of making it past the Sirian Gate Guard, is there?"

The pilot took a moment to answer. "I always like to hope that we'll beat
the odds, even if they're stacked a million-to-one against us."

"The odds were against us when we dodged one missile," Carter
declared. "How the hell are we going to dodge the full firepower of a
hundred kilometer wide asteroid station?"

"I wish their Gate Guard were only a hundred kilometers wide," the pilot
commented. "We might have a fighting chance then."

Fighting, Carter thought. "You know, I shouldn't have let you talk
me out of putting in a call to Sirius when we sighted those incoming fighters."

The pilot shrugged. "You really think it would have done any good?"

Carter grinned wryly. "Part of the art of diplomacy lies in knowing how
to make your opponent look bad. Sure, they probably wouldn't have been
willing — or even able — to call off their fighter attack, but
when the public got wind of our transmission, they'd see a poor, defenseless
civilian under ruthless attack by their own military. It could
have drummed up sufficient public sentiment to let us pass by their Gate Guard
unmolested."

The pilot remained silent. Carter figured the man hadn't thought of that
angle.

"There may still be time," Carter explained. "I want to send a
transmission to the Gate Guard — no! To both the Gate Guard
and Sirius A IV. Send the Sirius A IV copy on both their traffic
control frequency and enough of their public bands to make sure it can
get picked up by their news organizations. It's only, what, fifteen
light-minutes to Sirius A IV from here, right?"

"About that much, yeah," the pilot answered.

"That's a half-hour round-trip signal time; we've got over an hour 'til we
reach the hyper hole. Should be more than enough time to give 'em
second thoughts. Hand me the microphone!"

This time, there was no hesitation. The pilot lowered the slender black
cord through his flight deck hatch; Carter snatched it while it dangled in
mid-air before him. "Start it," the Ambassador ordered.

A few soft-button-presses and some display lookups later, and the outgoing
frequencies and transmit-vectors were all selected. The pilot pressed a
switch with firm conviction. "Recording," he whispered.

Carter closed his eyes for a moment to focus his thoughts, then spoke into the
tiny pickup. "Attention, Sirius. This is James Carter, from
Sol. I am in an outbound spacecraft with two travelling companions,
attempting to get home. Four hours ago, two of your nation's war machines
embarked on an attempt to end the lives of everyone on board my craft.
Now, we are only a little over an hour away from your Gate Guard. We have
little doubt that this great sentinel of yours, built to keep intruders
out, will turn its guns on us."

"Therefore, we surrender. We offer this vessel and all its contents to
you for the taking. We offer up ourselves as prisoners of war. I
know I now represent one of your sworn enemies. Many of you may even
blame me for starting the conflict in which we are now embroiled. But
please, don't sacrifice the lives of my innocent travelling companions for the
sake of pre-emptive vengeance. Take us prisoner instead. We will
not, and indeed cannot, put up any resistance to your forces. We
wave the white flag. James Carter, over and out."

The pilot cut the recording and reeled the mike back up onto the flight
deck. "Sending to all parties," he said, pressing the single button that
started the transmit sequence. Now, all they could do was wait for an
answer.

"You know," the pilot grumbled, "They know where we're headed. If
they'd been willing to accept a surrender, they would have told us so a long
time ago."

Carter shook his head. "I know the odds are low that they'll change their
minds. But, well, you said you like to hope you'll beat the odds."

But an hour later, when the Sirius/Sol Gate Guard loomed large below them,
they'd still heard nothing. A vain hail or two went out from their limo
to the Gate Guard, but as they feared, again came no response.

The pilot let out a long, resigned breath. "Looks like this is it.
The Gate Guard's probably got its weapons locked on us already. We've
got no Active Radar Absorption, we've got engines limited to 1.2g, and
there's only one place for us to go. They'll know exactly where we are
instant by instant. They're just waiting for us to close the gap so that
the kill will be quick and clean."

Carter shook, breathing in sodden gasps, as he glared out the bubble window at
the ever-growing Gate Guard. There really was nowhere to run or
hide. Keep diving for the hyper hole and the Gate Guard would blast them
to fragments. Avoid the hyper hole, and their pursuers would be upon them
in less than half an hour. What could —

A flash from a missile launch turret erupted from the Gate Guard's surface
. . . but it wasn't aimed at their spacecraft. Carter looked at
where the flash seemed to point. It zeroed right in on the hyper hole,
where —

"Fighters!" the pilot screamed. "Our fighters! Looks like at
least two carriers' worth! They just came outta both sides of the hyper
hole, at speed!"

Carter did. The instant his harness clicked shut, the spacecraft began
gyrating randomly, as it had done when the Sirian cruise missile made its pass
at them earlier. The jinking rotations were getting the better of his
inner ear; he grabbed a barf-bag out of a slot on the wall and heaved.
When he looked back up, he noticed his aide for the first time since the
pursuit, strapped into the seat across from him and curled into a fetal
ball. It looked like a damn good idea, but Carter's paranoia got the
better of him and he stuck his head into the window. The Gate Guard's
surface covered his entire view, gross surface details whizzing past. He
thought he caught the briefest streak of a fighter darting away behind them, a
scant few hundred kilometers away — the kind of close call that made
space-traffic controllers flinch. Amid his pilot's evasive maneuvering,
Carter was accelerating toward the hyper hole.

"What did you say about hitting the dead center of the hole?" Carter winced.

"I'll hit it," the pilot grunted, wrestling with the controls as he glanced
from display to display. The wild wobbling of their evasive maneuvers
subsided and distinct, deliberate pitches and yaws pointed their engine where
it needed to be. The constant thrust at last pushed them onto a direct
line perpendicular to the hyper hole's flat plane. Carter thought he
could see the edge flying toward them when he craned his head forward.

"We're okay," the pilot reassured both his passengers and himself. The
maneuvering thrusters had kicked in automatically, and brought the vessel back
on course and line in a heartbeat. They'd probably been grazed by a
kinetic weapon or a magnetic snare from the Gate Guard, now that they no longer
jinked about randomly. "And . . . transit!"

The stars to the front flashed frantically as the welcoming backdrop of Sol
space irised out to replace the starry battlefield of Sirius. Carter felt
elated for half a second, before another jolt made him scream.

"Boundary! Boundary!" the pilot yelled, and those were the last words
Carter heard. The cabin lights went out instantly, replaced with dim red
emergency lamps. The flimsy door in the cabin's floor burst outward, and
a wind rushed out like water gushing down a drain. Carter's ears popped
wildly. Explosive decompression! He forced his mouth open
and his throat to go lax, letting the waning pressure pull the air from his
lungs lest they burst. Mercifully, normal cabin pressure was less than
half an atmosphere, with the same amount of oxygen, but far less nitrogen, than
the air on Earth — but his skin still felt tighter and tighter as the
pressure dropped. As the last of the cabin's air vanished, the shrieking
wind gave way to absolute silence.

Carter's eyes bulged and felt painfully dry, but he had to find —
there! A cabinet door had thrown itself open, revealing a giant
clear-walled rubbery bag tethered to the hull. He unbuckled, pushed
against the wall while pulling the bag free — gravity had disappeared
along with the air — and wriggled his way into it. Once completely
inside, he gave a good yank on a cord at the bag's opening. The hole
sealed itself off, and the whole bag inflated from a tiny oxygen tank contained
inside. Encased in this emergency balloon, Carter could finally breathe
again; but to keep from poisoning himself with his own CO2, he
quickly strapped the tank's rebreather onto his face. It reeked of fresh
rubber, having sat unused since the spacecraft first entered service.

The plastic bubble encasing him was transparent, but gave a distorted view,
like staring through a clear shower curtain. Carter glanced over at his
aide; the young man was already in his own emergency pressure balloon, and had
probably crawled in before Carter had even started looking for his.
Carter needed to know what had happened, and if they could still fly to a safe
haven. The tether attached to these balloons was pretty long; long enough
to let him move around freely within the cabin and then some. He pulled
himself toward the center of the cabin floor to look out the door.

He expected to see a big gash torn in the lower cabin; but instead, all he
could see were stars. The entire bottom half of the spacecraft was
missing! The engine, the fuel tanks, the air and water recyclers,
everything. That second hit he'd felt must have knocked them off course
in the middle of hyper hole transit. The rest of the vessel was back in
Sirian space, 8.6 light-years away.

A speaker on the small oxygen tank blared, "Are you two all right in
there?" Carter's nerves were already on edge, and the sudden noise nearly
made him panic. But he recognized it as his pilot's voice. "Carter
here," he hoped the tank's short-range radio would automatically transmit his
reply, "I'm in a rescue ball."

He couldn't hear his aide speak, but he could vaguely see his lips move through
two layers of clear rubbery plastic.

"Good, I read you both," the pilot's voice returned. "We're back in Sol
space, but it's pretty frantic out here with three empty fighter
carriers. The Gate Guard's gonna send an Ascender to pick us up.
It'll be a tight squeeze, but it beats asphyxiation. My flight deck's
sealer-hatch slammed shut the moment the pressure dropped, so I can't see
what's going on in your cabin. Can you describe it?"

"Everything below our deck is gone," Carter replied. "I can see open
space through the center door."

"Damn," the pilot whispered. "You two're both lucky; it sounds like the
boundary sliced through the hull only a couple meters aft of you!"

"Why didn't the door keep our air in, like it did with yours?" Carter
demanded.

"The passenger cabin was built as one tall space," the pilot replied.
"The floor isn't part of the safety bulkhead system."

I'm going to yell at their design team when I get back, Carter thought.
"Do they have another limo prepped for me? I don't intend to stick around
at a Gate Guard."

"As a matter of fact, they tell me they're putting you on a liner bound for
Titan."

"Titan?!" Carter winced. "Why is the diplomatic corps sending me all the
way to Saturn? I was supposed to be on Ganymede after the summit."

"Everything within half an A.U. of Jupiter is on lockdown," the pilot's voice
told him. "That war you started is already on our doorstep. We just
got word that some kind of Alpha-Centaurian attack force just blew past the
other Gate Guard."